"It isn't too late," the andat murmured. "Manat Doru used to do it all the time. He'd send a note to the Khai claiming that the weight of holding me was too heavy, and that he required his rest. We would go down to a little teahouse by the river that had sweetcakes that they cooked in oil and covered with sugar so fine it hung in the air if you blew on it."
"You're lying to me," Cehmai said.
"No," the andat said. "No, it's truth. It made the Khai quite angry sometimes, but what was he to do?"
The singing slave smiled and took a pose of greeting to them that Cehmai returned.
"We could stop by the spring gardens that Idaan frequents. If she were free she might be persuaded to join us," the andat said.
"And why would the daughter of the Khai tempt me more than sweetcakes?"
"She's well-read and quick in her mind," the andat said, as if the question had been genuine. "You find her pleasant to look at, I know. And her demeanor is often just slightly inappropriate. If memory serves, that might outweigh even sweetcakes."
Cehmai shifted his weight from foot to foot, then, with a commanding gesture, stopped a servant boy. The boy, seeing who he was, fell into a pose of greeting so formal it approached obeisance.
"I need you to carry a message for one. To the Master of'I'ides."
"Yes, Cehmai-cha," the boy said.
"Tell him I have had a bout with the andat this morning, and find myself too fatigued to conduct business. And tell him that I will reach him on the morrow if I feel well enough."
The poet fished through his sleeves, pulled out his money pouch and took out a length of silver. The boy's eyes widened, and his small hand reached out toward it. Cehmai drew it back, and the boy's dark eyes fixed on his.
"If he asks," Cehmai said, "you tell him I looked quite ill."
The boy nodded vigorously, and Cehmai pressed the silver length into his palm. Whatever errand the boy had been on was forgotten. He vanished into the austere gloom of the palaces.
"You're corrupting me," Cehmai said as he turned away.
"Constant struggle is the price of power," the andat said, its voice utterly devoid of humor. "It must be a terrible burden for you. Now let's see if we can find the girl and those sweetcakes."
"They tell me you knew my son," the Khai Machi said. The grayness of his skin and yellow in his long, hound hair were signs of something more than the ravages of age. The Dai-kvo was of the same generation, but Maati saw none of his vigor and strength here. The sick man took a pose of command. "Tell me of him."
Maati stared down at the woven reed mat on which he knelt and fought to push away the weariness of his travels. It had been days since he had bathed, his robes were not fresh, and his mind was uneasy. But he was here, called to this meeting or possibly this confrontation, even before his bags had been unpacked. He could feel the attention of the servants of the Khai-there were perhaps a dozen in the room. Some slaves, others attendants from among the highest ranks of the utkhaiem. The audience might be called private, but it was too well attended for Maati's comfort. The choice was not his. He took the bowl of heated wine he had been given, sipped it, and spoke.
"Otah-kvo and I met at the school, most high. He already wore the black robes awarded to those who had passed the first test when I met him. I ... I was the occasion of his passing the second."
The Khai Machi nodded. It was an almost inhumanly graceful movement, like a bird or some finely wrought mechanism. Maati took it as a sign that he should continue.
"He came to me after that. He ... he taught me things about the school and about myself. He was, I think, the best teacher I have known. I doubt I would have been chosen to study with the Dai-kvo if it hadn't been for him. But then he refused the chance to become a poet."
"And the brand," the Khai said. "He refused the brand. Perhaps he had ambitions even then."
He was a boy, and angry, Maati thought. He had beaten Tahi-kvo and Milah-kvo on his own terms. He'd refused their honors. Of course he didn't accept disgrace.
The utkhaiem high enough to express an opinion nodded among themselves as if a decision made in heat by a boy not yet twelve might explain a murder two decades later. Maati let it pass.
"I met him again in Saraykeht," Maati said. "I had gone there to study under Heshai-kvo and the andat Removing-the-Part-ThatContinues. Otah-kvo was living under an assumed name at the time, working as a laborer on the docks."
"And you recognized him?"
"I did," Maati said.
"And yet you did not denounce him?" The old man's voice wasn't angry. Maati had expected anger. Outrage, perhaps. What he heard instead was gentler and more penetrating. When he looked up, the redrimmed eyes were very much like Otah-kvo's. Even if he had not known before, those eyes would have told him that this man was Otah's father. He wondered briefly what his own father's eyes had looked like and whether his resembled them, then forced his mind back to the matter at hand.
"I did not, most high. I regarded him as my teacher, and ... and I wished to understand the choices he had made. We became friends for a time. Before the death of the poet took me from the city."
"And do you call him your teacher still? You call him Otah-kvo. That is a title for a teacher, is it not?"
Maati blushed. He hadn't realized until then that he was doing it.
"An old habit, most high. I was sixteen when I last saw Otah-cha. I'm thirty now. It has been almost half my life since I have spoken with him. I think of him as a person I once knew who told me some things I found of use at the time," Maati said, and sensing that the falsehood of those words might be clear, he continued with some that were more nearly true. "My loyalty is to the Dai-kvo."
"That is good," the Khai Machi said. "Tell me, then. How will you conduct this examination of my city?"
"I am here to study the library of Machi," Maati said. "I will spend my mornings there, most high. After midday and in the evenings I will move through the city. I think ... I think that if Otah-kvo is here it will not be difficult to find him."
The gray, thin lips smiled. Maati thought there was condescension in them. Perhaps even pity. He felt a blush rise in his cheeks, but kept his face still. He knew how he must appear to the Khai's weary eyes, but he would not flinch and confirm the man's worst suspicions. He swallowed once to loosen his throat.
"You have great faith in yourself," the Khai Machi said. "You come to my city for the first time. You know nothing of its streets and tunnels, little of its history, and you say that finding my missing son will be easy for you."
"Rather, most high, I will make it easy for him to find me."
It might have been his imagination-he knew from experience that he was prone to see his own fears and hopes in other people instead of what was truly there-but Maati thought there might have been a flicker of approval on the old man's face.
"You will report to me," the Khai said. "When you find him, you will come to me before anyone else, and I will send word to the Dai-kvo."
"As you command, most high," Maati lied. He had said that his loyalty lay with the Dal-hvo, but there was no advantage he could see to explaining all that meant here and now.
The meeting continued for a short time. The Khai seemed as exhausted by it as Maati himself was. Afterward, a servant girl led him to his apartments within the palaces. Night was already falling as he closed the door, truly alone for the first time in weeks. The journey from his home in the Dai-kvo's village wasn't the half-season's trek he would have had from Saraykeht, but it was enough, and Maati didn't enjoy the constant companionship of strangers on the road.
A fire had been lit in the grate, and warm tea and cakes of honeyed almonds waited for him at a lacquered table. He lowered himself into the chair, rested his feet, and closed his eyes. Being here, in this place, had a sense of unreality to it. To have been entrusted with anything of importance was a surprise after his loss of status. The thought stung, but he forced himself to turn in toward it. He had lost a great deal of the Dai-kvo's
trust between his failure in Saraykeht and his refusal to disavow Liat, the girl who had once loved Otah-kvo but left both him and the fallen city to be with Maati, when it became clear she was bearing his child. If there had been time between the two, perhaps it might have been different. One scandal on the heels of the other, though, had been too much. Or so he told himself. It was what he wanted to believe.
A scratch at the door roused him from his bitter reminiscences. He straightened his robes and ran a hand through his hair before he spoke.
"Come in."
The door slid open and a young man of perhaps twenty summers wearing the brown robes of a poet stepped in and took a pose of greeting. Maati returned it as he considered Cehmai Tyan, poet of Mach]. The broad shoulders, the open face. Here, Maati thought, is what I should have been. A talented boy poet who studied under a master while young enough to have his mind molded to the right shape. And when the time came, he had taken that burden on himself for the sake of his city. As I should have done.
"I only just heard you'd arrived," Cehmai Tyan said. "I left orders at the main road, but apparently they don't think as much of me as they pretend."
There was a light humor in his voice and manner. As if this were a game, as if he were a person whom anyone in Machi-or in the worldcould truly treat with less than total respect. He held the power to soften stone-it was the concept, the essential idea, that Manat I)oru had translated into a human form all those generations ago. This widefaced, handsome boy could collapse every bridge, level every mountain. The great towers of Machi could turn to a river of stone, fast-flowing and dense as quicksilver, which would lay the city to ruin at his order. And he made light of being ignored as if he were junior clerk in some harbormaster's house. Maati couldn't tell if it was an affectation or if the poet was really so utterly naive.
"The Khai left orders as well," Maati said.
"Ah, well. Nothing to be done about that, then. I trust everything is acceptable with your apartments?"
"I ... I really don't know. I haven't really looked around yet. 'Ibo busy sitting on something that doesn't move, I suppose. I close my eyes, and I feel like I'm still jouncing around on the back of a cart."
The young poet laughed, a warm sound that seemed full of selfconfidence and summer light. Maati felt himself smiling thinly and mentally reproved himself for being ungracious. Cehmai dropped onto a cushion beside the fire, legs crossed under him.
"I wanted to speak with you before we started working in the morning," Cehmai said. "The man who guards the library is ... he's a good man, but he's protective of the place. I think he looks on it as his trust to the ages."
"Like a poet," Maati said.
Cehmai grinned. "I suppose so. Only he'd have made a terrible poet. He's puffed himself three times larger than anyone else just by having the keys to a building full of papers in languages only half a dozen people in the city can read. If he'd ever been given something important to do, he'd have popped like a tick. Anyway, I thought it might ease things if I came along with you for the first few days. Once Baarath is used to you, I expect he'll be fine. It's that first negotiation that's tricky."
Maati took a pose that offered gratitude, but was also a refusal.
"There's no call to take you from your duties," he said. "I expect the order of the Khai will suffice."
"I wouldn't only be doing it as a favor to you, Maati-kvo," Cehmai said. The honorific took Maati by surprise, but the young poet didn't seem to notice his reaction. "Baarath is a friend of mine, and sometimes you have to protect your friends from themselves. You know?"
Maati took a pose that was an agreement and looked into the flames. Sometimes men could be their own worst enemies. That was truth. He remembered the last time he had seen Otah-kvo. It had been the night Maati had admitted what Liat had become to him and what he himself was to her. His old friend's eyes had gone hard as glass. Heshai-kvo, the poet of Saraykeht, had died just after that, and Maati and Liat had left the city together without seeing Otah-kvo again.
The betrayal in those dark eyes haunted him. He wondered how much the anger had festered in his old teacher over the years. It might have grown to hatred by now, and Maati had come to hunt him down. The fire danced over the coal, flames turning the black to gray, the stone to powder. He realized that the boy poet had been speaking, and that the words had escaped him entirely. Maati took a pose of apology.
"My mind wandered. You were saying?"
"I offered to come by at first light," Cehmai said. "I can show you where the good teahouses are, and there's a streetcart that sells the best hot eggs and rice in the city. Then, perhaps, we can brave the library?"
"That sounds fine. Thank you. But now I think I'd best unpack my things and get some rest. You'll excuse me."
Cehmai bounced up in a pose of apology, realizing for the first time that his presence might not be totally welcome, and Maati waved it away. They made the ritual farewells, and when the door closed, Maati sighed and rose. He had few things: thick robes he had bought for the journey north, a few hooks including the small leatherbound volume of his dead master's that he had taken from Saraykeht, a packet of letters from Liat, the most recent of them years old now. The accumulated memories of a lifetime in two bags small enough to carry on his hack if needed. It seemed thin. It seemed not enough.
He finished the tea and almond cakes, then went to the window, slid the paper-thin stone shutter aside, and looked out into the darkness. Sunset still breathed indigo into the western skyline. The city glittered with torches and lanterns, and to the south the glow of the forges of the smith's quarter looked like a brush fire. The towers rose black against the stars, windows lit high above him where some business took place in the dark, thin air. Maati sighed, the night cold in his face and lungs. All these unknown streets, these towers, and the lacework of tunnels that ran beneath the city: midwinter roads, he'd heard them called. And somewhere in the labyrinth, his old friend and teacher lurked, planning murder.
Maati let his imagination play a scene: Otah-kvo appearing before him in the darkness, blade in hand. In Maati's imagination, his eyes were hard, his voice hoarse with anger. And there he faltered. He might call for help and see Otah captured. He might fight him and end the thing in blood. He might accept the knife as his due. For a dream with so vivid a beginning, Maati could not envision the end.
He closed the shutter and went to throw another black stone onto the fire. His indulgence had turned the room chilly, and he sat on the cushion near the fire as the air warmed again. His legs didn't fold as easily as Cehmai's had, but if he shifted now and again, his feet didn't go numb. He found himself thinking fondly of Cehmai-the boy was easy to befriend. Otah-kvo had been like that, too.
Maati stretched and wondered again whether, if all this had been a song, he would have sung the hero's part or the villain's.
No ONE HAD EVER SEEN IDAAN'S REBELLIONS AS HUNGER. THA'1' HAD BEEN their fault. If her friends or her brothers transgressed against the etiquette of the court, consequences came upon them, shame or censure. But Idaan was the favored daughter. She might steal a rival girl's gown or arrive late to the temple and interrupt the priest. She could evade her chaperones or steal wine from the kitchens or dance with inappropriate men. She was Idaan Machi, and she could do as she saw fit, because she didn't matter. She was a woman. And if she'd never screamed at her father in the middle of his court that she was as much his child as Biitrah or Danat or Kaiin, it was because she feared in her bones that he would only agree, make some airy comment to dismiss the matter, and leave her more desperate than before.
Perhaps if once someone had taken her to task, had treated her as if her actions had the same weight as other people's, things would have ended differently.
Or perhaps folly is folly because you can't see where it moves from ambition into evil. Arguments that seem solid and powerful prove hollow once it's too late to turn back. Arguments like Why should it be right for them but wrong for me?
She h
aunted the Second Palace now, breathing in the emptiness that her eldest brother had left. The vaulted arches of stone and wood echoed her soft footsteps, and the sunlight that filtered though the stone shutters thickened the air to a golden twilight. Here was the bedchamber, bare even of the mattress he and his wife had slept upon. There, the workshop where he had labored on his enthusiasms, keeping engineers by his side sometimes late into the night or on into morning. The tables were empty now. Dust lay thick on them, ignored even by the servants until the time came for some new child of the Khaiem to take residence ... to live in this opulence and keep his ear pricked for the sound of his brother's hunting dogs.
She heard Adrah coming long before he stepped into the room. She recognized his gait by the sound of it, and didn't call. He was clever, she thought bitterly; if he wanted to find her, he could puzzle it out. Adrah Vaunyogi, bright-eyed and broad-shouldered, father of her children if all went well. Whatever well meant anymore.
"There you are," Adrah said. She could see his anger in the way he held his body.
"What have I done this time?" she demanded, her tone carrying a sarcasm that dismissed his concerns even before he spoke them. "Did your patrons want me to wear red on a day I chose yellow?"
The mention of his hackers, even as obliquely as that, made him stiffen and peer around, looking for slaves or servants who might overhear. Idaan laughed-a cruel, short sound.
"You look like a kitten with a bell on its tail," she said. "There's no one here but us. You needn't worry that someone will roll the rock off our little conspiracy. We're as safe here as anywhere."
Adrah strode over and crouched beside her all the same. He smelled of crushed violets and sage, and it struck Idaan that it had not been so long ago that the scent would have warmed her heart and brought a flush to her cheeks. His face was long and pretty-almost too pretty to be a man's. She had kissed those lips a thousand times, but now it seemed like the act of another woman-some entirely different Idaan Machi whose body and memory she had inherited when the first girl died. She smiled and raised her hands in a pose of formal query.
A Betrayal in Winter Page 5